If, as Virginia Woolf once said, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”, then a mother must also have a sturdy lock, some ear-muffs, kid-traps, cunning, and a gut of steel.

What happens when stories go dark? When writing them uncovers something within you as a writer that makes you deeply uncomfortable? Come with me to dark places…

Where do ideas come from? Where do we get our inspiration? Lately I’ve been looking at what inspires me and feeds my imagination and I've discovered that it's filled with the things I LOVE: place, history and mythology.

*Sticks up hand* Hi, my name is Vicki and I am a serial-self-doubter. Most days I’m pretty sure I suck at this writing thing. But here's how I beat the Ratty-McCrappy-Pants that lives in my head to finish two books anyway.

When I started learning how to improvise it wasn’t so that I could become a better writer. But that's exactly what happened when I followed a hunch that I should try this different form of storytelling on for size.